That reminded me of something from the neighborhood I grew up in. A house around the corner from ours went up in flames. I don't remember what the cause was, it was at least 20 years ago, but it was very serious. I don't believe anyone was harmed, but we could see into the garage by the time the flames were out, and their car was melted down to the frame.

Another time, I suspect it was arson, an abandoned house in the woods caught fire. To give you an idea of where it was, the main road through our neighborhood was "Old Stone Dr." (made up of course). The street off this road that led to the street I lived on was "Sunshine way", which ended in a T intersection with "Really Sunny Place". This fire took place in the woods between "Really sunny place" and "Old Stone Dr."

Thankfully no one was hurt there either and like I said, it was probably arson, or just some kids fooling around in an abandoned house and accidentally caught it on fire and bailed.

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Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here. Be cheerful, strive to be happy. -Desiderata

Evidence exists that they were probably not only dealing, but cooking meth as well: after they left, a full crew was there in hazmat suits, working for several weeks. They hauled away 4 huge dumpster loads of debris. And gutting the place down to the bare studding is not a usual prelude to reletting a suburban house.

It could have also been a marijuana grow-op. Apparently because of all the water the plants needs and put out into the air, it causes black mold to grow pretty much everywhere in the house. There is also usually some janky electric wiring going on as well

Did not know that -- thanks! And of course, either one would cause them extreme nerves when the cops started showing up at the door. No wonder they took off without saying anything to the landlord! (I see I didn't mention that above. They left piles of trash all over, and after about a month of not seeing them around, I called and asked when the place was going to be cleaned up. Property management was puzzled, because their lease still had several months left to run, and they'd paid that month's rent.)

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~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~It's true. Money can't buy happiness. You have to turn it into books first. ~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

I, for one, am just glad that both the class of new friends I'm making and my neighbors have improved to the point where the response of new friends to learning where I live is no longer "Oh, the guy that deals pot to my roommate lives across the street from you." However, they were the least offensive possible drug dealers - they pretty much just sold pot to college students.

All the stories about neighbors and drugs reminded me of a story of my own.

Back in my college days, I lived with a roommate in an apartment near campus. It was a two-story apartment, which we thought was pretty slick. The entrance to the place was on the second floor, up a set of stairs. Roommate and I were on pretty friendly terms with the two girls next door, who were also college student. There was a group of guys a couple of apartments down, however, who annoyed all of us. People would come and go at their place at all hours and they had frequent loud, drunken parties.

One day, the neighbor girls came over to our place very upset. The loud guys had been having another drunken party (in the middle of the day ) and had found a little kitten who apparently lived in the neighborhood. One of them thought it would be funny to fling the kitten from the second story of the apartment, across the parking lot, and over some power lines, where he landed in an empty lot. The neighbor girls ran out and grabbed the kitten, who - thank goodness - was fine apart from a sprained leg.

The four of us went from being annoyed with the loud guys to utterly loathing them. We waited for a time when there were all sorts of people coming and going at their place then called the police saying we thought they were dealing drugs - which was perfectly true. We'd suspected that for some time.

When the police arrived, they were caught red-handed with fairly large quantities of hard drugs and at least two of them wound up in jail. Good riddance.

We never found the little kitten's owner, but the neighbor girls wound up keeping him.

My story-I live 1/2 mile from an elementary school, in a "good" neighborhood, where neighbors tend to watch out for each other, and there is a lot of dog walking and jogging and landscaped yards, just very Americana.

A friend of mine had insomnia and admitted that she would get up and walk at 4:30am. Another friend heard, and was concerned about coyotes. Yes, there are some, we live near some greenbelts.

Anyway, I offered to start walking with her, for weight loss and exercise. We both felt totally fine, and met the newspaper delivery guy, got to know which neighbors work swing shift, where the outside dogs were, it was nice and quiet, and...boring...

Until, one morn, a car went round the cul-de-sac, twice, and then pulled u to us, rolled down the window, and the driver asked us, at 5am, "Hey, ya wanno go smoke some weed"

Pitch black, too dark to see the plates or even the driver, but I quickly repsonded, "no thanks, trying to stay healthy!"

And he drove away.

my friend and I froze until he drove away, and then just laughed for a mile.

We are in our 40's, not thin, and it was 5am!

we have no idea where he was coming from. is there a drug house nearby? have not noticed lots of traffic anywhere!

Oh well.

never tried drugs in college, not going to start in my 40's.

Oh, we did not tell our friend afraid of coyotes, because she would get hysterical and tell us how we were putting our lives in danger. drugs and wild animals, oh my!

Not that I am terribly well acquainted with said culture, but I belive the general rule was always "Puff, Puff, Pass" If there was no one else in thecar he was just trying to keep with the spirit of the rule. Seems like he took you no politely and headed on his way.

This isn't really a scary story, but it was pretty dramatic at the time.

Last summer, DH and I finally got round to employing some builders to build an extension along the back of our house. About the first thing they had to do, of course, was measure up and then start digging the foundations for the new building. They brought in a digger and dug out a trench where the new wall was going to be, all about a metre deep.

As a little background, we live in one of the oldest named settlements in England (although our road dates back only to the 1930s or so). So it's not unheard of to find historical remains when doing any digging around the area, and in fact our next-door neighbour always told us the story of how a skeleton had been found in our back garden 20 years ago when the then owners were putting in a new garden path. Our neighbour, a lovely old lady who adores chatting with people, had told our builders all about it.

So when one of the builders happened to mention to his boss that he had seen what looked like human bones in the bottom of the trench as he dug it out, the boss decided he had probably better follow it up. Boss came round to our house during the evening, explained what had happened, and we all went out into the garden and climbed down into the trench.

What followed was exactly what would happen in a film. Boss took a shovel and said 'That's where he thought he saw the bones', and prodded at the side of the trench. There was a sharp crack, and out of the earth fell a curved piece of bone, with half an eye-socket and a nasal bone on the unbroken edge. We cleared away the earth from the side of the trench very gingerly, and there was the rest of the skull, staring straight out at us.

So DH went and called the police. He said the conversation went along these lines:

DH: Oh, hello, I'd like to report that I've found some human bones in my garden.Police: Right. Are you sure that the bones are human, not animal?DH: It's a skull.Police: And you're sure it's a human skull?DH: ...yes...

Shortly after, the police started arriving. It started off with one of the lower ranks, who confirmed that yes, these were human remains, and set up tape across our driveway saying 'Crime Scene: Do Not Cross'. He then called someone of higher rank, who in their turn called someone of even higher rank, and so on and so forth.

Very fortunately, it was concluded that the bones were definitely old, and almost certainly from the Anglo-Saxon cemetery on which our road had been built. Also, there were no artefacts, just bones, so the archaeologists weren't interested other than to note that another find had been made. DH and I spent a couple of hours searching through the spoil heap from the trench to find as many fragments as possible (the trench ran straight through the middle of the burial, so had carried away ribs, vertebrae, arm bones etc.). We bagged up everything we could find and put it in behind a barrier before the concrete went in for the foundations, and that was that.

One of the police had coincidentally studied archaeology at university, and she judged that the skeleton was that of a fairly young woman. The burial was probably pagan, since the body had been laid east-west. Interestingly, looking along the trench, we could see numerous other places which were probably other graves, including one right under where the old garden path had been, so our neighbour was absolutely correct.

So, I suppose it's just as well that DH and I aren't particularly squeamish about this kind of thing, since we have a grave right underneath the sink in our new kitchen, and probably several more under the house and garden. Mind you, I imagine that there are quite a lot of places like this in the UK!

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When you look into the photocopier, the photocopier also looks into you

It's surprising that pre-Christian bones would be in such good condition. At the cemetery near Sutton Hoo, the bodies had become mere carbon imprints on the soil. The ground must be much less acidic near Gyburc's home.

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My cousin's memoir of love and loneliness while raising a child with multiple disabilities will be out on Amazon soon! Know the Night, by Maria Mutch, has been called "full of hope, light, and companionship for surviving the small hours of the night."

I have a very old story of my father's to tell. It really is quite bizarre.

When my Dad was a teenager, in the late 40's, his family lived on the bottom floor of a house, with a Russian Diplomat and his family living on the upper floor. Their son was of a similar age to my Dad so they hung out together quite a bit. The boy went to the embassy to see his parents, with my Dad in tow. Dad decided to wait for him outside when the big Russian guard with the machine gun stepped in front of him when he went to follow the boy in.

But that wasn't the weird instance. There was a spy scandal breaking and in the middle of the night, the Russian family moved out lock, stock and barrel. My Dad and his parents and siblings didn't hear a thing! They were wakened the next morning by the RCMP, wanting to question the Russian family and then when they found them missing, wanting to know what happened to the Russian family. I'm not sure they believed my Dad and his family that they hadn't heard anything but they were never charged.

A few years ago, I needed security clearance for an event. I wondered if this incident would come up in the search but apparently not, since I was cleared to work the event.

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After cleaning out my Dad's house, I have this advice: If you haven't used it in a year, throw it out!!!!.

When I first moved to Tasmania, I rented a cute little Edwardian house in Hobart. It had a very distinctive little Juliet balcony at the front, and was the only house in that street with one.

A few months back there was a big drug bust in Hobart, in the same street. Somebody had set up a hydro system to grow pot in the house, the cops raided it and so on. I wondered at the time which house it was - it wasn't a big street.

A few days later there was a pic in the paper of one of the police involved moving bags of evidence out the front of the house.

I live in a mobile home park now, and the first year we were here, I'm sitting at my computer, which is located at the front of my home. I hear what sounds suspiciously like a very large diesel engined vehicle. I ignore the first one, but when another one rumbled down my street shaking my whole home, I looked out the window, and see one the next sreet over, a huge fire.

I have a friends with a scanner, and a son who is a volunteer fireman, calling me to make sure it wasn't me. Needless to say, that was pretty scary. The people got out okay with their dog, but their cat did not make it.

A couple summers ago, I hear a familiar rumble of the deisel engines again, but also the rev of police cars, and they sounded really close. We go to leave for work in the morning, and there was a call for my neighbor across the street, who had called his sister claiming he was going to kill himself.

Last summer, a home owner who had a heart attack or stroke while he was cooking, caused a grease fire. The report said he had died before the fire started.

We had a hot air balloon land at the end of our dead end street, too. To bad it was a weekday - or Dad would have been out there with his 35mm camera. The balloonists were cool. They let us kids help them pack up the balloon. Our Moms came out made sure we weren't annoying the balloonists and that the lady that owned that land was ok with us being on her property (nice lady but kids made her nervous). Then they went back home and left us to it.